PN Featured Artist: Danielle Stirling

PN Featured Artist: Danielle Stirling

This weeks Pure Nintendo featured artist is the very talented Danielle Stirling (AKA: DeeRex). Below you can checkout some of Danielle’s awesome video game themed art. If you’re a Pokémon, or Legend of Zelda fan you’ll definitely want to check this one out!

KD: Hey Danielle! Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and what you do?

DS: Hey, I’m Danielle. I am a hobbyist artist. I go by DeeRexArt on social media. By day I am a JavaScript developer, so people are often surprised when they find out I make art. I think they imagine art and programming to be very different, but they’re both technical disciplines that require thought, strategy, planning and problem solving, and I love stuff like that. I would say I do more fantasy or surreal style pencil crayon drawings. Fantasy art has always interested me, I grew up admiring people who could imagine something in their mind and make it into an actual picture. I pick characters from videogames (mostly Nintendo), anime, cartoons, animated movies, etc. and put them in different scenes—sometimes the scene is from the game, sometimes it’s from my mind. I should probably mention that my art is often literally and/or figuratively dark; I go through a lot of black pencil crayons. I don’t have a particular reason why I lean toward darker themes, I just like villains and there aren’t too many villains I know of that would be surrounded by rainbows and butterflies.

KD: When did you begin illustrating? Is it something that you’ve always been interested in?

DS: I started illustrating when I was a little kid. I’ve always loved drawing and coloring. I remember the first time I managed to stay inside all the lines of a picture in a coloring book. I was four and it was a tiger, haha. I remember it because I was so happy—I brought it around to show my whole family and everything. That moment was 20 years ago, and I’ve been drawing strong ever since.

“Do You Want to Play With Me”

KD: What’s your process when you have an idea for a new piece?

DS: Let’s see if I can articulate my process… The majority of the time I choose characters before a background scene—I like building a scene around the particular moment or emotion I chose the characters to be in. I try and channel feeling through the characters and enhance it with the mood of the background. Anyway, I’ll then plan out how big I want the characters to be, decide on facial expressions and how their body needs to be positioned to convey the proper body language; at this point I probably have 6+ sketched character drafts already. Once I decide on that stuff I will make a clean outline of the characters so I can easily make duplicates of them to test in background ideas I have. The background, honestly, I plan out far less extensively. I usually messily pencil in where I want certain things to go and lay down liberal amounts of masking fluid but, in general I just color and see what happens. Sometimes I panic when I don’t know where a background is going, but I literally say to myself “just keep drawing, and eventually you’ll see where it’s supposed to go”, works every time.

“Take it to the Fridge, Cranky”

KD: Out of all the artwork you’ve created, which piece is your favorite or has special meaning to you?

DS: Hmm my favorite. That is really difficult—all of my art holds special meaning to me. Actually, I got it, my favorite one is Pokemon Master Dragonite. That drawing holds a bit more significance in my heart than everything else. I made it as a gift for my little brother and he’s a real special guy. That drawing came entirely from my heart and so when I see it I get an extra boost of happiness, and get to reminisce about how awesome drawing that one felt. Kind of cheesy… but oh well.

“Pokémon Master Dragonite”

KD: What’s your favorite Nintendo game or series? Why?

DS: Zelda is my favorite Nintendo series, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Twilight Princess is my favorite game of all time. I’ve loved Zelda since I was a little kid. I’ve always appreciated the story writing and adventuring style. Twilight Princess is my favorite game because I love the story, the graphics and character/world designs are beautiful, being a wolf is fantastic, and getting to learn new sword skills was awesome. Beating the Cave of Ordeals is my actual favorite pastime in life—I love planning out different strategies to make it through. Zant is a great villain (although Ghirahim is my favorite Zelda villain) and the Twilight Realm was just a really cool boss world.

“Puppet Master”

KD: Do you have any upcoming projects or illustrations you’d like to tell us a little about?

DS: I always have upcoming drawings. I have post-it notes all over my wall of drawings I’ve thought of but haven’t gotten to yet. Right now I am making a Ganon drawing (OOT). It is my take on the moment where Ganondorf is defeated and becomes Ganon, there’s going to be lots of fire, fairies, blood and awesomeness. After Ganon I have a Bowser final battle themed (Super Mario 64) drawing. That one I’m excited for because it’s one of the rare drawings where I picked a background before I thought of character design. It’s going to rely heavily on perspective tricks—it’s basically bowser on the final stage watching from above as Mario climbs up through the final world, hard to explain but it will be cool.

“Charizards”

KD: Thanks so much for taking the time to share your art with us! Where can our readers see more of your creations or contact you if they have questions?

DS: No problem at all! This was fun, it has been a while since I’ve talked in depth about my art style and strategy.

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Hello! My name is Kaelyn, and I LOVE Nintendo! I can’t remember a time when I didn’t play video games. Growing up with 3 older brothers it was hard to avoid them. Nintendo was always something that put me in a good mood, or taken me away when I needed a break from reality. My favorite series is the Legend of Zelda! I’ve always been into drawing Nintendo characters and seeing other people’s video game themed art. I have a dream of one day meeting the great Shigeru Miyamoto, and one day working for Nintendo (Don’t we all).

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